Western Digital 15TB HDD laughs in the face of your cloud storage allowance

Storage company Western Digital has launched the largest-capacity hard drive of its kind ever made.

The 15TB Ultrastar DC HC620 HDD beats the 14TB model announced by the company last year, and is designed for enterprise users looking to cram as much storage space as possible into their server set-up.

There’s no news on a price yet, but don’t expect this to be affordable to consumers. The 14TB device costs around $1,000 (around £779) so we can expect the upgraded model to be priced accordingly.

In a press release (via SlashGear), Western Digital said: “Setting a new bar for TCO, the Ultrastar 15TB host-managed SMR HDD is well positioned for hyperscale cloud and traditional data center workloads, including large video surveillance ‘smart city’ initiatives, storage for regulatory compliance and Big Data storage.”

The high-capacity drive might not be top of the pile for too long. Seagate is still thought to be planning a 16TB drive before the end of 2018, but we’ll see if that materialises.

Of course high-capacity HDDs still pale in comparison to the storage offered by a solid state drive, the largest of which is the 100TB Nimbus Data ExaDrive DC100. That’s enough for 20,000 high definition movies and 20 million songs, the latter of which is just shy of half of Spotify’s entire library of music. Damn.